Television
In 1978, the PRC had less than one television receiver per 100 people, and fewer than ten million Chinese had access to a television set. According to a World Bank report in 2003, there are about 35 TVs for every 100 people. Roughly a billion Chinese have access to television. Similarly, in 1965 there were 12 television and 93 radio stations in mainland China; today there are approximately 700 conventional television stations—plus about 3,000 cable channels—and 1,000 radio stations.
Television broadcasting is controlled by China Central Television (CCTV), which, with its 22 program channels, is the country's only national network. CCTV, which employs about 10,000 people and has an annual income of ¥1.12 million yuan (2012,=$177 million U.S. dollars), falls under the dual supervision of the Propaganda Department, responsible ultimately for media content, and the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, which oversees operations. A Vice Minister in the latter ministry serves as chairman of CCTV. The network's principal directors and other officers are appointed by the State. So are the top officials at local conventional television stations in mainland China—nearly all of which are restricted to broadcasting within their own province or municipality—that receive CCTV broadcasts.
CCTV produces its own news broadcasts three times a day and is the country's most powerful and prolific television program producer. It also has a monopoly on purchases of programming from overseas. All local stations are required to carry CCTV's 7 pm main news broadcast; an internal CCTV survey indicates that nearly 500 million people countrywide regularly watch this program.
Even if CCTV is the most powerful network of mainland China, it has only about 30% of audience share all over the national territory. The fact shows how the Chinese viewers are biased in favour of local TV programs, that are more likely to represent the differences of an audience that is the largest in the world, more than the national or even international programs, that can hardly attend the needs of such a wide public.
Since September 1, 2006, the Chinese government has banned foreign-produced animation between the hours of 5:00 to 8:00 pm on state-run television to protect struggling Chinese animation studios that have been affected by the popularity of such cartoons.
Read more about this topic: Media Of China
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)